September 2014

September 30, 2014

Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s Pulitzer Prize winning play staged like a Feydeau farce! Doors slam on a boisterous set aclutter with tchotchkes and eccentrics as fireworks go off from the basement. Where there’s smoke, there’s . . . No, no, not revolutionary bombs! Scott Ellis’ revival of You Can’t Take It With You at the Longacre Theater sets the stage on fire!

September 29, 2014

David Cronenberg turns horror to comedy in his latest feature Maps to the Stars, based on fiction by Bruce Wagner. Hollywood is known more for its superficiality than for depths of any kind, so exploring themes of damaged children, incest, and high narcissism set in L.A., you may come up with a movie as disturbing as Maps to the Stars. Unless you take it as comedy, which Cronenberg claims was his intention. His star Julianne Moore came away from Cannes with a best actress prize for her turn as Havana Segrand, a waning star beset by frightening visions of her mother (Sarah Gadon). She has a laughing fit discovering that the child of a rival actress has been killed, leaving a coveted role, in fact a remake of one in which her mother starred, to her. Mothers and daughters are toxic in this movie. Quipped Bruce Wagner at the NYFF’s Q&A, “I saw this as a tender coming of age story. And much like Boyhood, it took a long time to make.”

September 28, 2014

On the last day of shooting Lily of the Feast, a feature set in 1970’s Williamsburg, Troy Garity, in a suit, sits on the edge of a bathtub, counting. The L.A. based actor, son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden plays Santo Bastucci, a young man with a gift for memorizing numbers, a handy skill, and members of the mob are making offers he can’t refuse. The bathroom is miniscule in the soundstage clutter of Windmill Studios in Brooklyn, a set specifically designed for the movie by its director, Federico Castelluccio. We know him as Carmella’s heartthrob in HBO’s The Sopranos, when things are not going so great between this suburban mob wife and husband Tony, but here for Lily of the Feast, director Castelluccio, a known fine artist, extends his art to the screen. As many have told me, in making the feature length version of this story from a short, his artistic vision informs every frame. The film also stars Paul Sorvino and David Proval and is a passion project for screenwriter/ producer Michael Ricigliano, Jr. who grew up in this neighborhood.

September 27, 2014

Rita Wilson told a funny story about having worked with Bobby Short, resident star singer pianist at this special supper club back in the day. “It was a commercial,” she laughed and sang a few notes from the Charlie ad, and we never really met. That was my brush with greatness.” That statement seemed odd given that she’s married to Tom Hanks who had Barry Diller, David Geffen, and Mike Nichols at his table to hear her perform her songs on opening night. But in many ways the charm of Rita Wilson’s Café Carlyle act is to confess just how hard it was to get there, given she’s risk averse. When she asked how long it took the audience, one man said, two and a half hours. Well, it took me decades, countered this actress, movie producer, and accomplished songwriter, who had some formidable risks to overcome: her parents fled oppressive regimes in Greece and Bulgaria. “You want to talk about risks!” Raised in Los Angeles, Rita Wilson idolized the musicians, songwriters and singers from Laurel Canyon: Carole King, Linda Rondstat, James Taylor, and especially Joni Mitchell; their influence on her music is resonant: “Joni” is an homage. But her themes are evident in the original numbers, “What You See is What You Get” and “Grateful.”

September 23, 2014

The Pearl Theater’s revival of Uncle Vanya illustrates this fine company’s signature charm, and does one better, doing Anton Chekhov the good service of playing his tragicomedy for humor over gravitas. Christopher Durang’s Tony-winning Chekhov sendup, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, made it all laughs. At the Pearl, when the characters speak lines like “I’m so bored,” the line is more than a cute dig to anyone without the means to live in their upscale country home with servants. On opening night this week, Dominic Cuskern, who plays the revered, hypochondriac professor spoke about these “characters,” egotistical eccentrics, the housebound enslaved by their sense of duty, the lovelorn consumed by suppressed passions. They’re funny!

Ethan Hawke made it to the Stone Rose Lounge for the premiere of Denzel Washington’s new movie The Equalizer. Co-host of the party, Hawke proclaimed that the big blast action movie was polar opposite to the documentary he made about Seymour Bernstein, a poetic composer/ pianist/ educator, one of many highlights of the New York Film Festival opening this week. Superficially, Hawke is right. Denzel Washington plays a classic epic-scale do-gooder, up against the Russian mob in The Equalizer. His formidable opponents sport ominous tattoos and hit the girls they’ve forced into prostitution. Denzel, as Robert, quietly shuffles through the movie making a lot of noise, reading books for pleasure, and mentoring the young. Tough, he can skewer a fat neck with a corkscrew. Blood obscures inked skin, as a late night Home Depot offers a playground of lethal weaponry. And yes, Pushkin, the main Moscow honcho fries in this sure to be blockbuster.

September 18, 2014

Jeff Goldblum wears a pork pie hat and wide grin in his Café Carlyle debut, even when heckled by a man who wanted less talk and more music. But the performance, in which he acts as quiz show host, pianist and front man for the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, a grand name for a jazz ensemble, proceeds amiably with more shmooze than most events at the legendary Carlyle. At Tuesday’s opening, Goldblum recounted how Woody Allen, who plays at the Carlyle on Monday nights, suggested The Fly actor make this scene. He also stopped the music to shout out to Edward Norton who attended with his pal Fisher Stevens, and Al Roker, celebrating his wedding anniversary.

September 16, 2014

Mosab Hassan Yousef fixes you with his intense, messianic gaze, hardly seeming to blink. The son of a Hamas founder, dubbed “the green prince,” he gave intelligence to the Israeli Shin Bet, went into exile, and wrote a book about his experience, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices. His Shin Bet handler Gonen Ben Yitzhak is softly intense, a grandson of Polish Holocaust survivors; he left the Shin Bet and stepped up to help Mosab, when he faced deportation from his new home in the United States. The relationship between Arabs forced into spying against their communities, and their Israeli handlers is a trope now familiar in the west from last year’s fiction films Bethlehem and Omar, with fatal results. The story of Mosab and Gonen, as recounted in the current documentary, The Green Prince, offers a contrast, and a paradigm for peace, even as the headlines look bleaker than ever. Eschewing notions of “occupation” and other rhetoric, these men spoke to me last week about the movies and the Middle East:

September 13, 2014

Along with Glenn Close,Meryl Streep hosted a premiere screening this week of Israel Horovitz’ My Old Lady at MoMA. Her family in tow, husband Don Gummer and daughter Mamie, she was celebrating her pal Kevin Kline’s lead performance in this charming romance set in Paris, as well as Horovitz’ debut as filmmaker. At 75, Israel Horovitz, author of 70 stage plays, took this one, popularly performed all over the world in many languages, and adapted it for the screen. His daughter Rachael Horovitz produced. He got Kevin Kline, as he recounted introducing the evening: at last Kline gets the girl. Horovitz got Dame Maggie Smith to play the titular old lady because at least she doesn’t die.

September 11, 2014

A fashion insider once told me, the clothes displayed on runways are entertainment. They don’t exist. In the case of the Brooklyn Museum’s spectacular history of high heels, Killer Heels, many will thank heaven: the footwear in videos and traditional museum cases looks that thrillingly treacherous. A Christian Louboutin ballet flat hoisted vertical on a stiletto for example may be a fetish item, to be worn perhaps by a prima ballerina in perpetual en pointe. True, some historic pumps from Delman’s dated late 1930’s look chicly dowdy, some Asian influenced styles look like artful clogs, Ferragamo’s pumps for Marilyn Monroe are simply elegant, but Louboutin’s “Lipspike’s Bootie” or Koolhaas’s “Gaga Shoe” are pure weaponry.